Working at Basecamp (and Threadless) is totally different from my experience working in an agency environment.

On designers coming up with projects to work on versus fulfilling specific goals and feature requests… It’s a mix of both at Basecamp. Everyone—designer, programmer, support or otherwise—are always encouraged to try new things, invent fun projects for themselves, and make things that shake up our usual workflow. But of course, we have a responsibility of making Basecamp the app better every day. So we all try to make sure we’re doing the day-to-day “make Basecamp better” work while finding time for “it’d be awesome if we did this, too…” work.

On the process for designing… Our process is a little bit messy, a lotta bit exploratory, and by no means locked into place. We have about 9 different designers with different aesthetics, different ways of thinking, and different ways of starting (and finishing!) projects. What we share in common, though, is that we constantly try new/weird iterations of ideas and share every one of those. (On Basecamp, of course!)

Conversation may go a bit like: - Here’s the button this way… - Here’s the button this other way… - Here’s if we had a text link instead of a button… - Actually here’s this crazy illustration instead of text… - Here’s me making all of that super tiny and green… - Here’s me making all of that super huge and red… - I like this particular version the most, what do you think?